Today at VMworld, Cisco and VMware announced that a growing number of customers are using joint private cloud, data center, and virtual desktop solutions from the two companies to accelerate business transformation and increase IT agility. Around the world and across vertical industries, customers are utilizing the combination of Cisco Unified Computing System(TM) (UCS) and VMware virtualization technologies to fuel a wide variety of business-critical applications. Recent examples of these innovative customers include Choice Hotels International, Columbia Sportswear, and Northrim Bank.

Choice Hotels International Choice Hotels franchises more than 6,200 hotels, representing more than 500,000 rooms in more than 30 countries, under the Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Quality, Clarion, and other brands. The company recently built a new data center infrastructure and redesigned the software that supports hotel franchisees. The new services-oriented architecture, built on the Cisco UCS and VMware vSphere(R) has resulted in immediate efficiency gains.

"Cisco's intelligent infrastructure and VMware virtualization turned out to be a winning combination for Choice Hotels," said Todd Davis, chief information officer, Choice Hotels International. "We migrated 900 virtual servers in one-third the time it took us to migrate 188 physical servers. We have reduced space, power, and cooling requirements, while accelerating time-to-market for in-house applications. Our IT strategy has enabled us to increase profitability for our hotel franchisees."

Columbia Sportswear A global leader in the manufacture and wholesale of active outdoor apparel, footwear, accessories and equipment with over 3,200 employees across 45 locations, Columbia Sportswear faced an aging and costly Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) infrastructure while in the midst of a rapid business expansion. To help sustain the company's strong projected revenue growth for the next few years, Columbia moved to a new SAP ERP system underpinned by VCE Vblock(TM) Systems -- featuring converged compute and network technology from Cisco, storage and data protection from EMC, and server virtualization and virtualization management from VMware. This private cloud is highly available and elastic, supporting faster time-to-market, while reducing operating costs.

"Projects that used to take us weeks to deploy, now take days or even hours," said Michael Leeper, Director of Global Infrastructure at Columbia Sportswear. "Cisco UCS and VMware vSphere integrates with our existing Cisco Nexus-based network to deliver agility and intelligence to our systems, enabling the IT team to be more service oriented and respond more quickly to tough business requests."

Northrim Bank A commercial bank headquartered in Anchorage, Alaska, Northrim Bank employs 250 people in 11 branches across 350 miles in southern Alaska. Northrim sought to upgrade the bank's legacy infrastructure to dramatically increase the speed of service at the bank's teller stations. The company combined virtualized infrastructure in a central co-location facility with branch infrastructure built on the Cisco Office-in-a-Box Solution with Cisco UCS E-Series Servers and VMware Horizon View(TM). Combined with an overhauled wide area network (WAN) built on Cisco Nexus and Catalyst switches, the solution helped drop branch office infrastructure operating costs by 50%, while speeding system response times and strengthening business continuity.

"In a vast geographical territory, we are able to meet our business-critical needs to provide 24/7 banking services to our customers," said Erick Stoeckle, Network & Systems Manager at Northrim Bank. "Having an integrated solution from Cisco and VMware reduced the complexity of a new branch setup, allowing us to cut our rollout time by half and enabling us to manage a single solution instead of multiple components. Together, Cisco and VMware have helped us deliver a truly cloud-based application construct to our customers."

Winning Combination: Cisco and VMware The combination of Cisco UCS servers with VMware infrastructure can provide value, flexibility, and agility to customers of all sizes. Organizations continue to use Cisco and VMware innovations to build some of the most advanced private cloud, data center, and desktop virtualization solutions.

Cisco innovations at the ASIC level deliver application performance and policy control for virtualized workloads. Cisco's Unified Computing System incorporates software control of complete server configuration to a degree unique in the industry. Rich, API-enabled integration achieved in collaboration with VMware enables policy-based provisioning and administration of both physical servers and virtual machines from within VMware software. These combined technology innovations from Cisco and VMware can maximize the potential of virtualization and cloud to transform IT capabilities and improve data center economics for customers.